Credit:
NDN

That shocking footage shows Justin, who was 14 at the time, parodying his song "One Less Lonely Girl" by subbing in a racial epithet — while joking about killing black people and earning membership in the Ku Klux Klan.

"Facing my mistakes from years ago has been one of the hardest things I've ever dealt with," Justin emotes in a statement published by Us Weekly. "But I feel now that I need to take responsibility for those mistakes and not let them linger. I just hope that the next 14-year-old kid who doesn't understand the power of these words does not make the same mistakes I made years ago. At the end of the day I just need to step up and own what I did."

Scooter Braun, Justin's manager, tried a little spin control on Instagram, writing, "Some mistakes have no excuses. They are just wrong. But how a man reacts to those mistakes… How he owns it and learns from it… That defines him more than the mistake itself."

Here's hoping Justin doesn't have cause for a third apology this week…